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Mental Health Australia and project partners are calling on consumers and carers from multicultural communities to join an advisory group that will be a key source of advice to the National Multicultural Mental Health Project. The project represents a national focus on mental health for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and aims to aims to support service providers to improve cultural responsiveness and accessibility. Click here to find out more and apply.

Following the exciting announcement of a new national multicultural mental health project last week, Mental Health Australia is currently recruiting for a National Project Manager and a National Project & Administration Officer. This is an excellent opportunity to join our team and make a difference as part of an important national project. Candidates from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply. Applications for both positions close 21 May 2018. Click here to find out more.

Mental Health Australia has joined forces with the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA) and the National Ethnic Disability Alliance (NEDA) as part of an alliance to deliver a new national multicultural mental health project, announced today by Minister for Health the Hon Greg Hunt MP and funded by Australian Government.

The project will work with multicultural mental health consumers and carers to provide a renewed and much needed national focus on mental health and suicide prevention for people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds.

Working alongside such well respected organisations and colleagues in the multicultural community will be a huge advantage in delivering this new project.

We all have a lot to learn from each other, and to unite the mental health and multicultural sectors, to work closely with CALD consumers, carers, and communities, will make a real difference to service delivery and provision.

I have both some encouragement and some disappointment this
week regarding the future of the MHiMA Project.

I’ve recently received a letter from the Minister for Health
advising the Australian Government has agreed to continue to support the MHiMA
Project beyond December 2016 and will undertake a targeted competitive
approach to market some time in 2017 to determine the long term project lead.
While it is still unclear at this stage what the future project will look like,
I see this as a positive step towards providing long term certainty and
investment in multicultural mental health.

Mental Health Australia has been offered another six month MHiMA
Project extension while this process occurs. However, as previously advised,
and noting the damage (at least 3) short term MHiMA Project contract
extensions have had on the multicultural mental health sector, we will not
accept this offer. Current project activities will be completed by 31 December
2016. Our sincere thanks go to the dedicated NCCCWG who have served the
project so passionately to this point, but whose terms will finish with the end
of the project. The MHiMA website, including the Framework elements, will be maintained while the process to determine the future project
lead is undertaken.

While this iteration of the MHiMA Project will close at the end of
the year, Mental Health Australia will continue to do all we can to secure
effective long term investment in multicultural mental health.

As we wrap up of project activities, I’m also pleased to advise we
have finally received permission to publicly release the ‘recommendations for
future directions report’, which we developed in consultation with the
multicultural mental health sector and provided to Government in March 2016.
You can read the report and attachments here.

We had the chance to meet with the MHiMA Project Advisory Group
this week. The group shared at disappointment that we are still
awaiting a government decision on the future of the MHiMA project, and
expressed their concerns that after the substantial input from the
MHiMA NCCCWG it was difficult to see any concrete strategies to address
CALD mental health in the consultation draft of the Fifth Plan.

The group agreed to share resources and ideas in order to ensure
that CALD issues are well articulated as part of the consultation process for
the Fifth Plan, in the hope of a final plan that takes concrete action to
address the substantial disadvantage that CALD communities face.